Life, the Universe and Everything II - Physiological Spirituality

Life is a strange commodity. We all have some of it. We value it variously. It can run out surprisingly quickly. How to use it is an interesting question amongst many interesting questions on life. How many years we have in life will never be more important than how much life we put into our years. Some would talk about experience as fundamental, and some of these say experience is as to intensity not duration.

We know we would all astound ourselves if we did all of which we are capable. Science tells us we build connections in our brain at the astounding rate of 1,800,000 connections per second in the first two years of our lives and never stop learning although various changes bring focus and relevancy to what we notice, retain and are able to retrieve. And this is just the mental aptitude arena, although aptitudes are rarely mutually exclusive, of course.

Of all the metaphors for how the brain works, the preference is for patterns, hooks and retrieval – we operate and identify patters of significance, create relational hooks on which to hang specifics and none of this will mean a jot unless we access these sufficiently often to build good tracks to find things again, and tracks do grow over, especially when other inputs are coming in at an estimated 11000000 items every second of every day of our lives – from our all our senses.

Tradition has it that we can only focus on one or a few of these 11 million inputs. This is being shown to be untrue. We have the capacity to focus on many more, indeed our brains do focus on much more all the time – usually unconsciously, and through enormously efficient filters to consciousness based on pattern-recognition/level of significance, which is situational - related to habit and/or expectation. Even processes of ageing and health are governed by expectations driven by, primarily, socially/culturally driven expectation.

In a later blog we move into the discussion on whether we are Grown-Ups or merely Growing Ups, but for now two sayings come to mind: “How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.” [Carver], and 'Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life'...both relate, in essence, to certain limitations on life, and particularly death.

Now many have concerns just now about the nature of spirituality, energetics and consciousness. One may be concerned with with a wide topic here, some would say of cosmic (or perhaps in some circles even comic) proportions. The great place that the next blog will go is into this arena of how to access at will and use the 11 million simultaneous connectedness our brains are using with an 'always on' availability. In my next blog will also be covering the physiological origins of spirituality...

A question to followers: “Is spirituality of physiological origin?”.